Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadians on my friendslist. :)

I am going to visit family today and hopefully have a huge turkey dinner.

Happy Canada Day!

I am...not doing anything in particular today. ^_^;; But I did apply to ten jobs. Hopefully at least a couple of them will call me back next week.

help_japan is a fandom auction where people can donate various creations and others can bid on them, provide proof of donation to one of the approved charities, and receive art/fanfic/etc.

This is my bid post. In case anyone wanted to commission me for a good cause. ^^

I've still been applying to jobs with no luck, so I thought I would do something worthwhile with my free time.

Life is going pretty good so far. I like that the gym I'm signed up in is walking distance from the house and my membership is prepaid for the year. I've been making an effort to go regularly. In the past week, I've been there three times and on other days I've still tried to go out walking or do some physical activity at home.

I have been slacking a bit on studying, although it's kind of a hard test to study for because of the scope of what can appear on there. I've studied the 50 most common GRE words, and quite a few besides that (I have flashcards and such). I'm going to write a few timed practice essays and work on some of the reading comprehension samples. I don't have much hope for my mathematical ability, but the math section is multiple choice, thankfully.

Midnight is getting more used to the house. Sadly, Isis and Bastet are not getting anymore used to Midnight, and they're even trying to bully her a little. O_o Which is kind of funny considering that Midnight could very easily beat them up if she wanted to, and has actually been very, very good with them since she knows she's the new cat in their territory.

Phew! Although there will still be plenty of unpacking to do, I am glad to say that I won't have to be doing any cleaning and moving tomorrow. This is good. My arms, legs, neck and back currently hate me.

I'm at my parents' place in Brampton, staying for about the next year.

Midnight is here now. She's kind of freaking out and has been hiding under my bed (I think she likes my room best so far because at least the scents are mostly familiar to her here). I've given her food under the bed for today, and I might have to bring her litterbox into my room for today. Blech. At least it's just been changed.

Isis and Bastet promptly greeted Midnight with a hiss when I first brought her in, but they're at least not handling it any worse than we really expected. Mom's keeping the girls in her room with her while she reads for the evening so that if Midnight does explore, it won't be in a hostile environment just yet.


With the GRE looming on the horizon (September 15th), I'm not going to put too much effort into job hunting just yet. I'll put my name into some job agencies, and I'll check around local offices. I'm going to also call the Ontario Disability Support office to investigate what I have to do to get myself identified as a person with a medical disability that is able to work...but that needs certain accommodations. The key ones are a) a job that will allow me to sit nearly the whole time, and b) I have to be allowed to eat small amounts of food regularly.

I'm on a roll lately for solving minor but annoying technical problems.

I fixed my mom's wireless connection even though it's a Mac and I know next to nothing about using Macs, and I got rid of the annoying Rogers spyware crap that was redirecting Firefox to their website and not letting me go to my homepage (which is my email login). My computer is now moved into my parents' house and the desk and everything else is set up. (Holy crap, that desk. X_X I'm lucky both my dad and my brother were around to help me move it - it's heavy).

SO TIRED TODAY. I spent the majority of the day moving and cleaning and fixing computer crap. The good news is that the bulk of the moving I had to do is done, so now it's just the leftover stuff and then moving Midnight in here with me.

On the other hand, the fact that I could handle doing as much as I did today at ALL is a step in the right direction. I'm sore but not unmanageably so.

My degree is mounted on my bedroom wall here. It's a nice reminder that if nothing else, I have accomplished one major thing in my life and I pulled it off while working a part time job and feeling like absolute crap a lot of the time. *gives self a tiny pat on the back for that*

Wednesday is the first lab meeting for the music and cognition study. That should be interesting. I'll have to figure out my availability.

I'm glad that I never got around to donating a few pairs of pants that I had previously outgrown. They fit better than most of my jeans now. Oops.

Note to self: You do not need new jeans. You do, however, need a belt or two to avoid having to do the "tug the jeans up" dance on a regular basis.

I've discovered something interesting courtesy of browsing medical websites. Apparently, there is a co-relation between a couple of my medical conditions. Blood sugar issues (hypoglycemia and certain kinds of diabetes) can be a cause of low blood pressure.

I looked this up after checking my blood pressure today on the pharmacy machine. My systolic was okay, but my diastolic was almost half what's actually healthy. @_@ 109/42. (Healthy is 120/80, and if the systolic is below 90 or the diastolic is below 60, it's considered unhealthy)

The low diastolic means that blood isn't being pumped effectively into my arteries and that it isn't carrying oxygen effectively to the rest of my body, hence the fainting.

My mom, by contrast, has pretty high blood pressure. We go to the same doctor, so we've been instructed to get a blood pressure cuff to share. Fortunately, mom is covered under dad's insurance so instead of paying $140 plus tax for it, it'll be more like $15-$20.


Since I have a blood sugar monitor already (although I stopped using it regularly as soon as my doctor said I didn't have to because pricking your finger multiple times per day = ouch), I have a plan. For two weeks, I'm going to put myself on a semi-strict diet. Not strict in terms of volume of what I eat, but strict in the sense of eating healthy stuff and no sugary junk.

I have already made dietary improvements, but I want to be semi-scientific about this. I want to see if I feel better after following every single bit of medical advice for my medical conditions to a T, and I'm going to make note of my blood sugar and blood pressure a couple of times per day.

I was glad to be able to go to lunch on Saturday as part of Dexcon. I had fun and I have to say that the salad at The Pilot was one of the best salads I've ever eaten at a restaurant. We were...probably the only people in the entire place under 50 years old, but hey. We kept to our own corner and talked, and everyone else sat and watched the jazz quartet.


X__X My stomach has been hating on me for the past few days. I've decided to be extremely careful with what I eat from now until I get better, and if it keeps up for more than a week from now, I'll call my doctor.


I signed myself up for a gym membership at the gym that's walking distance from my parents' place. I got a pretty good deal on the membership - it works out to about $28 a month for the first year, and it's written into my contract that if I continue on afterwards, my rate will be locked in at $10 a month for at least another year after. Yay anniversary promotion! I had a membership at that gym when it first opened, and it's got way more cardio equipment than the gym at York university. Notably, you also do not have to pay anything extra for classes.

I already warned them about my medical issues, and apparently since I have a medic alert bracelet and have already talked to my doctor about being able to work out (in fact, I'm supposed to), all is good there. I'm supposed to bring it up at my fitness assessment but that's about it.

Murrghh. If I don't get into graduate school this time around, I think I'm going to work for roughly 2-5 years and save up before giving it another shot. I'm pretty good at saving up and holding off on things in order to pursue a greater goal. This is also one small side benefit of being legally unable to drive - until my fainting has cleared up in full for a minimum of two years, getting my license and a car (and therefore car payments, gas, and insurance) are not happening.

Preparing for the GRE is frustrating because there's just so much vocabulary and math to study for, and so many essay topics you can possibly have to write about (there's 250 of each type of topic). At least I feel like I'm preparing better this time around than last time. I started earlier, I've been making flash cards...main thing I need to do is get some math tutoring. I even set up a test date that was early enough to be able to schedule another 2 months later and still have it completed well in advance of my application deadlines.

All I can do is try my best, I suppose.